Читать книгу Sidetracks - Richard Holmes - Страница 14
INSIDE THE TOWER
ОглавлениеA radio-drama based on the life of the poet Gérard de Nerval. All Nerval’s speeches are drawn from his own essays, letters and journals.
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| HOLMES | In 1855 Paris suffered a bitterly cold winter. During most of January the city lay under thick snow. At night temperatures dropped below minus ten degrees centigrade. The gas-lamps glowed in the streets with a dull, blue flame. The horse-drawn omnibuses jammed in the icy ruts of the boulevard, and the café windows were opaque with frost. Down by the Seine, the washerwomen’s sheets hung rigidly over the side of the laundry barges, and the river turned to ice under the Pont Neuf and the Pont Saint Michel. The wind blew cruelly through the cobbled back-streets. The beggars said the sun had died.(fade in over music the sound of wind; then muffled street noises, carriage wheels, coughing, footsteps crunching on snow, muffled swearing in French …) |
| EYE WITNESS | I suppose it was about six-thirty in the morning, Friday 26th January. I was on my way to work across the Place du Châtelet, when I spotted a man in black uniform and a couple of policemen hurrying down a side-street. The beginning of the rue de la Tuerie was nothing but empty, boarded-up houses, but after a few steps there was the blackened shop of a key-cutter on the left, with a sign, shaped like a huge key, standing out from the wall overhead against the frosty, snow-laden sky. Further on, on the other side, was the entrance to a narrow iron flight of steps, one of those street staircases which begins with four steep steps down onto a sort of iron landing running across the width of the alley. At the bottom level the steps lead into a sordid alley which disappeared at the far end into a labyrinth of filthy back-streets. It was into this foul alleyway, known officially as the rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, I saw a man in black with two policemen going purposefully. I followed them. The cobbles were covered in thick ice, and the iron banisters were loose in several places. At the bottom of the staircase I witnessed a grim scene. A man’s body was stretched out in the alley, his head resting on the last step, and his feet sticking into the gutter of a sewage pipe that came out of the alley-wall beneath the iron landing. They had just cut him down from the bars of a low window, in the cellar-wall above the bottom steps, from which he had hanged himself … The man in black turned out to be the commissioner of police.(water, echoing footsteps and voices, the slap of wet clothes on marble …) |
| MORTUARY | Slab number 14. Twenty-sixth January 1855. |
| ASSISTANT | Reception time: nine-thirty a.m. Sex: masculine. Age: forty-seven. Place of birth: Paris, Seine. Civil status: bachelor. Clothes and possessions: one black jacket; two calico shirts; two flannel waistcoats; one pair pale-grey trousers; one pair patent-leather shoes; one pair socks – red cotton (fade) … (fade in radiophonic music) |
| POLICECOMMISSIONER | Labrunie, Gérard. Also known as Gérard de Nerval, man of letters. Temporary address at the Hotel de Normandie, 13 rue des Bons-Enfants. A case of suicide by strangulation. This morning at approximately seven-thirty a.m. the deceased was found hanging from the bars of a locksmith’s shop in the rue de la Vieille-Lanterne. He had hanged himself with a length of sash-cord; the body was attached to the bars by means of the said cord. There were no signs of violence on the corpse. |
| MAXIME DU CAMP | Very early on Friday morning I received a message from Théophile Gautier informing me that Gérard de Nerval had been found hung … They’d sent for Gautier and Arsène Houssaye to confirm the identification. Gautier was apparently moved to tears; he had a long-standing affection for Gérard. It was easy for me to see the body in the mortuary. Poor Gérard was laid out flat on his back, his eyes shut, and his tongue just slightly protruding between parted lips. His fingers were clenched inwards on his palms, but his face was calm. His head was fractionally twisted on to his left shoulder-blade, and the tips of his feet were turned abnormally outwards. There was no trace of violence, no bruising, no contusions. Only, around the neck, there ran a thin line – more brown, as I remember, than red – which bore witness to the pressure of the cord, that piece of kitchen-cord which Gérard had shown me but six days previously – and which in his madness, he took for a seventeenth-century ladies’ dress-cord, no less than the actual dress-cord of Madame de Maintenon!(tolling bell effect: radiophonics) |
| HOLMES | Gérard’s funeral took place on the 30th January, and a mass was said for him in a side chapel of Notre Dame. In order to obtain permission for him to be buried in consecrated ground at Père Lachaise cemetery, a special application was made to the Archbishop of Paris. Suicide, when committed while ‘of unsound mind’, does not cut the victim off from the consolations of Mother Church.(monks’ choir singing the ‘Dies Irae’ in Gregorian chant. In the background the sound of digging, and wind blowing. Over this the scrape of a quill pen on paper and the voice of …) |
| DR EMILE | My Lord Bishop: M. Labrunie, Gérard de |
| BLANCHE | Nerval, was suffering from extreme fits of mental alienation, which seized him on repeated occasions during these last few years, and for which he received treatment from both my father and myself, Dr Emile Blanche, in this institution … Though M. de Nerval was not ill enough to be confined in a mental asylum against his will, yet in my considered opinion his state of mind had not been healthy or normal for a long time previously. He believed he had the same powers of imagination, and the same aptitude for work, as he had in the old days, and he expected to support himself as before on the income from his writing. Certainly he worked harder than ever, but one may feel that he was disappointed in his hopes, perhaps. His natural independence and pride of character prevented him from accepting anything in the way of aid, from even his best-tried friends. As a result of these mental – or moral – pressures, his reason was driven further and further astray; and above all this was because he now saw his madness face to face. I therefore have no hesitation in declaring, my Lord Bishop, that it was certainly in an extreme fit of madness that M. Gérard de Nerval put an end to his days.(gradually fade out sound of the plainchant, the digging, and finally the wind, during the next voice-over. Towards the end, radiophonics reappear) |
| MAXIME DU CAMP | He was mad, though it was an intermittent kind of madness, which in its moments of calm left him with a personality both gentle and original, and a mode of life that was full of oddities. But when his state became critical, he was a danger both to himself and those around him, and he would be carried off to Passy, to the mental hospital in the old town house of the Duc de Penthièvre, run by Dr Emile Blanche. These fits would either depress him to the point of coma, or else excite him to the pitch of fury; but they rarely endured for more than six months at a time. He would emerge from them slowly, like someone only half-awake and still under the impression of a vivid dream. I often used to go and visit him in the asylum when he was recovering. He said to me on one occasion: It’s so kind of you to come, Du Camp: you know our poor Dr Blanche is mad. He thinks he is running a mental hospital, and we all have to pretend to be mental patients in order to calm him down. I wonder if you could stand in for me a while, because I have to go over to Chantilly tomorrow morning to marry Mme de Feuchères. You will recall that Mme de Feuchères was the mistress of the last prince of the house of Condé, who hanged himself from a window with a silk handkerchief.(music starts faintly) |
